Month: June 2017

John Hacket (1592-1670) was a member and fellow of Trinity College. As Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry he oversaw the rebuilding of the cathedral, contributing £3,500 and raising far more. He was also generous towards his former college making a bequest of £1200 in his will towards the rebuilding of the ‘ruined’ Garret Hostel. The work was completed in 1671 and the building was known thereafter as Bishop’s Hostel. Hacket’s will also stated that rental income from the new building should go to the college Library for the purchase of books. At the time the Library was housed in Great Court, but Hacket’s bequest appears to have been an impetus towards the building of the new Wren Library. Work began in 1676 and was completed just under 20 years later in 1695. These two book stamps were purchased in 1677, almost certainly so that the Library could mark those books which came to it under the terms of the bequest.

Volume R.2.79 bears the impression of the larger of the two stamps on the front and back covers. Inside it contains a copy of a letter written by Hacket announcing his intention to leave a gift to the college. It also includes a copy of accounts from Bishop’s Hostel from the late 17th century. This includes an item from 1677 detailing the purchase of the book stamps for £1 15s.

A portrait of Hacket (probably given by his son, Andrew Hacket) hangs at the far end of the Wren Library. The Junior Bursar’s accounts for 1679-80 record a payment of 6s 6d ‘for the carriage of Bishop Hackett’s picture from London’. Hacket is depicted in Bishop’s clothes, holding an unrolled scroll with a red seal. The writing on the scroll records the detail of Hacket’s bequest to the college. In the background there are paintings of Lichfield Cathedral and Bishop’s Hostel.

John Hacket, ascribed to Valentine Ritz, oil on canvas

The Bishop’s Hostel accounts record that in 1681, £10 was spent on books from Dr Isaac Barrow’s Library. These included, as examples, a work on physics by Marino Ghetaldi (T.10.6) and Hypomnemata Mathematica by Simon Stevin (Q.16.91.t1). The bindings of these books do not, however, bear the mark of either of the book stamps.

The Library also owns Hacket’s small 13th-century Bible in two parts (B.10.24 and B.10.25) as well as a number of other books which were written by him including a volume of his sermons, his play Loyola published in 1648 which had been performed in Cambridge before James I in 1623, and a number of copies of his longest work – Scrinia reserata– on the life of his patron Archbishop John Williams. The volume of sermons, published posthumously in 1674, contains a frontispiece portrait of the author. The Library also owns the copper plate used for printing this portrait. By the time it was reused in a volume dated 1702 the wording on the bottom had been scratched out. Hacket’s portrait was presumably included in the later volume (which was not written by him) because it had been bought for the Library under the terms of his bequest.

Crewe 80.20 is a beautiful example of a ‘Hanway binding’, the name given to bindings specially commissioned by Jonas Hanway, an 18th century philanthropist. Often bound in red morocco (goatskin) and decorated with distinctive tooling, these books were designed to catch the eye and to help circulate ideas and principles that were close to Hanway’s heart. What is unique about this book is the inclusion of lines of verse written by hand on the front flyleaves which directly relate to the ornaments on the spine and cover. Hanway is known to have suggested or designed a number of emblematic tools which were used by his second binder, identity unknown. The photograph below of the spine shows some of these emblematic tools:

Arthur Devis [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsHanway made his money as a merchant working for the Russia Company, and the tale of his trials and adventures as a trader in Russia and Persia formed the subject of his well-received first publication, ‘An historical account of the British trade over the Caspian Sea’ (1753). Thereafter he began to write voluminously and published 85 known books and pamphlets. His driving force was his philanthropic interests, which ranged far and wide. Philanthropy for Hanway was a means to help people, in a practical and efficient manner, to support themselves; he saw no use in the wasting of money on lavish social events as a form of philanthropic giving. In 1756 he set up the Marine Society (which still exists today) to help recruit men, and later boys, to the Royal Navy; in 1758 he was elected governor of the Foundling Hospital, a children’s home which cared for and educated the destitute; through charities and societies, and his own writings, he supported numerous causes, including among others the lot of chimney sweeps and prostitutes, penal reform, and the raising of funds for people affected by a particular war or disaster; his lobbying and pamphleteering on behalf of disadvantaged children led to the passing of meaningful legislation.

A brief look at a contemporary of Hanway might shed light on why it was deemed important to distribute texts in special bindings. Thomas Hollis, a political propagandist, used his wealth to spread the ideas of republicanism as a means of protecting and advancing English liberty. He accomplished this by distributing suitable texts to libraries, initially in Britain and on the Continent, and later to America. The fine bindings were designed to enable such books to stand out and the emblems that were stamped upon them to further the libertarian sentiments. As Hollis himself wrote on the bindings of books, ‘… by long experience I have found it necessary to attend to them for other libraries, having thereby drawn notice, with preservation, on many excellent books, or curious, which, it is probable, would else have passed unheeded or neglected.’ A large number of Hollis bindings have survived, and several, among them some of Hollis’s own copies, can be found in the Wren Library’s Rothschild collection. An example at RW.6.14 is presented below:

While Hollis left no key to the meaning of his emblems, do we have here, in the form of verse, a clue to the meaning of some of Hanway’s?

Hanway had a certain reputation for eccentricity. He was (it is said) the first man to carry an umbrella around the streets of London at a time when it was usual only for women to do so. He wrote against tea, a drink that was still a relative novelty in England at this time, in his ‘An Essay On Tea, Considered As Pernicious To Health, Obstructing Industry, And Impoverishing The Nation: With An Account Of Its Growth And Great Consumption In These Kingdoms’, which was refuted at length by none other than Samuel Johnson, an ardent tea drinker, in his review of Hanway’s 1757 work ‘A Journal of Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston upon Thames, With Miscellaneous Thoughts, Moral and Religious, in a Series of Letters’, in which ‘An essay on tea’ appears.Overall, his contemporaries seem to have had a mixed opinion of Jonas Hanway: on the one hand respectful of his philanthropic work and on the other slightly disdainful of his prodigious, if turgid, writing output; he has been described as ‘one of the most indefatigable and splendid bores of English history’.